Review of the PHENND University Partners Meeting: Early Childhood Literacy

Posted by on January 30, 2014

By Eden Kainer and Liz Shriver

On December 11, PHENND and the Office of Strategic Partnerships hosted the second K-16 University Partners’ Meeting at the School District. The topic was promoting early childhood literacy through community engagement practices. With such a unique mix of K-12 teachers, parents, deans, professors, school district officials and non-profit leaders in attendance, PHENND is excited about the potential for unique partnerships to form through this new workshop format of the University Partners’ Meeting.

Jan Steinberg, teacher leader and founder of Literacy Corps, discussed her work at Simon Gratz High School. Through the Youth Driven Service-Learning Center, she established the Nicetown-Tioga Collaborative and the Literacy Corps. The founding of the Literacy Corps stemmed from her desire to engage her students through authentic learning experiences. As an English teacher, Jan realized she needed new strategies to build the literacy skills of her high school students. With service-learning as a framework, she engaged her students in supporting the literacy of much younger students. She helped the students create reading guides for books at the kindergarten level. These guides included vocabulary words and comprehension questions that the reader would ask the child as they read the book. Through this process her students became deeply engaged in supporting literacy in their own community. For some students, this was the first time they invested in reading an entire book, cover to cover. The students expanded the project to include the children of young mothers at nearby day care centers, eventually creating learning libraries in centers city-wide. The wide-reaching effects of the Literacy Corps are indicative of the deep academic and social impact that service-learning and long term partnerships can have on young people. Though she is a retired teacher with more than 35 years in the District, Jan has continued this work as the Community Service Outreach Coordinator at Parkway Northwest Peace and Social Justice High School.

The Philadelphia Writing Project similarly presented literacy as a whole community project. Michele Bell, teacher at the Powell School, and Mattie Davis, teacher at the William Dick School, engaged parents in literacy workshops. The workshops focused on four basic characteristics of an engaged literacy lesson: meaning centered, language based, human and social.  The workshops they designed included family bookmaking sessions, creating a “Reading the World” document using photography and other media, and building neighborhood memoirs. Ultimately parents brought these and other literacy activities home, using the school as a resource hub and support system for continued learning.

Ms. Doria Mitchell, the Director of K-2 Early Literacy and Special Projects in the Office of Early Childhood Education, presented to the audience the wide range of current partnerships and programs happening to support Early Literacy in the School District of Philadelphia. As a result of this meeting, Ms. Mitchell now sends out regular information about pre-Kindergarten meetings and many other important events hosted by the School District. If you would like to receive emails about Early Literacy programs from Ms. Mitchell, please email me at eshriver@phennd.org or Doria Mitchell at dnmitchell@philasd.org.

Our next University Partners meeting will be held February 26^th at the School District of Philadelphia from 3:30-5:00PM. The topic will be: Making Education Careers in Philadelphia Achievable for Millennials. The goal of this session will be to discuss how to support the next generation of Philadelphia urban education professionals. Workshops will feature unique pre-service teaching partnerships and the Youth Empowerment and Urban Studies minor at West Chester, which supports students across majors to engage in community based partnerships.

Please Register Here: February University Partners Meeting